hiv awareness – HIV stigmafighter

Hello my lovely people. Some of us are always counting their age, forgetting to do the things that make them happy. Remember, there is no such thing as putting your life on hold, because we are all ageing, every day!

This may sound weird, but I am always looking forward to ageing. When you cherish your dreams and love your life, ageing should not be your problem. As long as you are happy with yourself! Look at Eric the dragking, never giving a damn about age at all. Who knew I would be the first Dragking to be open about thriving with HIV?

Of course, for many of us living with HIV, it is quite a journey to get to this comfortable place that we all need to live and age healthily. Knowing first-hand how difficult it is and how many barriers we need to break, I have always been very committed as an activist member of the HIV community to share my personal experiences to change my lifestyle to improve my health-related quality of life.

Yes, there are many discussions and workshops on this topic, but how many of us really work together with people living and ageing with HIV instead of for them? So being always full of ideas as an HIV activist and entrepreneur, you may remember that last year I gave a performance called five ways to THRIVE. Well, sending the message through a performance or workshop is not enough!

What if we ask the HIV community directly to share their dreams, what they do to regain trust, and to share their journeys towards staying healthy while ageing with HIV?

Today I would like to share with you that we have indeed started to engage the HIV community to co-design community tools to express our challenges, and share our dreams and ideas to age healthily!

I am so blessed to get a lot of support from friends in the worldwide HIV community to think along, THRIVE is very much alive!

Through THRIVE we, as creative members of the HIV community, want to keep developing useful concepts and share our experiences. But we cannot do this alone and we will need support from our HIV allies to work with us to THRIVE while ageing healthily with HIV.

So, are you curious how you can engage with us? Get in touch and let’s THRIVE together!

Peace,

Eliane

We proudly announce that Stories of Hope will be part of the Global Village at AIDS2022 in Montreal, Canada, which will be held between 29 July and 02 August 2022.

So, nearly one year after our launch, succesfully collecting and showcasing the stories of 11 Heroes and distributing exclusive Stories of Hope postcards through various healthcare providers in the Netherlands, Stories of Hope will go global!

At the Global Village we will:

Showcase three original portraits of our Heroes of Hope, and share the Stories of Hope concept with the wider HIV/ AIDS community
Share sample health cards with Global Village visitors and discuss roll-out of more versions in other countries
Organise rapid story telling workshops to record more inspiring stories of talented People Living with HIV/ AIDS visiting the Global Village
Create new Stories of Hope to be launched during AIDS2022

If you will be visiting AIDS2022 and are interested to share your Story of Hope or want to learn more about how you can contribute to reducing HIV stigma in your country, get in touch!